Working with Prompts
Prompts enable users to specify criteria that determines the content of the view that they are inserting. Oracle Smart View for Office supports both prompts and page prompts. See also Working with Page Prompts for information on page prompts.
Prompts in Smart View are the equivalent of prompts in Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition. Smart View only supports column prompts.
Prompts are defined at the analysis level in Oracle BI EE. Users are prompted to enter values for these prompts each time a view is inserted in Smart View.
If prompts are defined on an analysis in Oracle BI EE, then when you insert a table, pivot table, or graph view from the analysis into Smart View, you are prompted to select the data to be displayed for that view. When inserting a compound view from an analysis that has prompts defined, you are prompted to enter values only one time for all the views in that compound view.
For example, a prompt on Year is designated for an analysis, and the years 2010, 2011, and 2012 are available to choose from. When you insert a table, pivot table, or graph, you are prompted to select which year's data to display: 2010, 2011, or 2012. Or, you can choose to insert the compound view, and the prompt selection you make is applied to all the views inserted. After insertion, you can edit the prompts on each individual view to select another year's data to display.
Views can only be edited individually. The edit operation will prompt you for the values to be selected for each view that is being edited.
You may edit prompts in views that were inserted, or copied and pasted.
Note:
Prompts defined on hierarchical columns in Oracle BI EE are not supported in Smart View.
To edit prompts:
- From the Oracle BI EE ribbon, select the Edit Prompts button to display your original selections.
Figure 20-9 Edit Prompts Button
If the report definition has changed on the server, your selections are reset, and you must select all prompts and columns again.
- In the Prompt Selector, modify the prompt selections.
Depending on how the prompt was set up in Oracle BI EE, you may be selecting data directly from a drop-down list on the Prompt Selector. You may also be picking values from the Value Selector dialog box.
Figure 20-10 is an example of a Value Selector, where the years 2008, 2009, and 2010 were selected for display.
Figure 20-10 Value Selector Dialog Box Showing the Years 2008, 2009, and 2010 Selected
After you click OK in the Value Selector, the selections populate the first prompt in the example Prompt Selector (Figure 20-11). A second prompt in the example Prompt Selector requires that you directly enter an amount; in this example, the amount to display is Billed Quantity greater than $5,000.
The completed Prompt Selector dialog then looks like Figure 20-11.
Figure 20-11 Filled-In Prompt Selector
In some cases, the data to choose from can be exceedingly long. To accommodate loading large amounts of data in the Value Selector, Smart View presents values in groups. Scroll and make selections from the first group shown, then click More to view and make selections from the next group. Continue clicking More until you have viewed and made selections from the entire data list. Figure 20-12 shows an example.
Figure 20-12 Value Selector Showing "More" for Large Amounts of Data
